3rd Place goes to: Albania

2nd Place goes to: Serbia - Look like he is got 2 wife!! WOW &_&

and the winner of the man of the year is: Ireland

Ah, the Irish are true romantics.
At least he’s holding her hand

Some cry & some hold back the tear as my father’s father (grandpa) pass away….

Published at LXer: For those on the RPM side of the fence, Fedora 41 has hit beta, and works better in VirtualBox than ever if you're curious to try it. Read More......

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 H323Plus 1.27.2 and PTLib 2.10.9.4 have been released.

Changes in H323Plus:

- support for Alpine Linux for smaller container images
- crash fixed on invalid RTCP packets
- memory leaks fixed
- GetCrytoMasterKey() restored that got lost in 1.27.1
- better support for cross-compiling
- various updates for newer compilers
- some smaller bug fixes

https://www.h323plus.org/source/

Changes in PTLib:

- support for Alpine Linux
- better support for cross-compiling
- various smaller bug fixes

https://github.com/willamowius/ptlib/releases

I’m starting to get a little bored of telling the story every time I pick up the phone or run into somebody, so I’ll just post it here, and then we can all move along from it.

Headline synopsis: I had a tooth abscess, it was really bad, I got hospitalised, and because I suffer from sleep apnea ended up on a high-dependency unit for a night (because sleep apnea and general anaesthetics don’t mix).

Longer version:

About six weeks ago I got a chest infection. Pretty nasty stuff, and I was coughing quite badly a lot of the time. I took a day off work at one point - which I rarely do for illness - so, you know, horrible.

As that was clearing, I started to develop toothache. I’ll be frank: I hate dentists, and have pretty much avoided them for my entire adult life. The pain was coming from near my wisdom teeth on the right side of my face, which have played up now and again a few times. I self-medicated with paracetamol and ibuprofen after a couple of days. I was unable to eat solids from around the 8th May.

I then travelled to London for business and stayed overnight. At my boss’ wife’s birthday party, I discovered that my jaw was so sore and unable to move, I could barely eat non-solids, and was struggling to swallow even fluids.

Buoyed by medication, the next morning (11th May), I was able to take on about 2 litres of water and a small amount of food, but I was quickly realising I was in pain that needed professional help. Leaving London early that day, I recognised that the following day I would need to seek emergency treatment.

Manchester has the University Dental Hospital. It’s often a struggle to get seen there, but casualties can walk up for 8.30am and get seen - for free - by a student dentist, supervised by some of the best qualified dentists in the country. I made my way out on the Thursday morning expecting to be seen, prescribed some antibiotics and to make my way home.

They took a look, X-Rayed my jaw to be sure, took another look, and referred me to Accident & Emergency. The abscess was large enough that they had become concerned I was going to be unable to breath within the next 24 hours.

The SHO from Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (“Max Fax” as it’s known), had been told to expect me in A&E within the hour. Off I trudged.

On being booked in at A&E, they took my blood pressure and pulse. They were off the charts. They took my temperature, and it was high. My body was fighting a raging infection, and losing. I was hooked up to an ECG, and they took some bloods. My glucose was off the charts - I hadn’t eaten properly in days, and my body was starting to pull down the fat reserves (of which I have ample supply) and eat itself.

The clincher though was the fact I was no longer able to really comfortably swallow without pain and discomfort. Not even fluids. Barely my own saliva. I was admitted, cannulated (a drip line being put into my hand), and put on saline within about 30 minutes.

Rebecca duly packed a bag of things for me, and being the angel she is, cancelled work and made her way to be my bedside, if for nothing else than to give me a bit of love, support and sympathy.

Things then got weird. They put some antibiotics on my IV, and there was a thought that maybe - strong as they were - I would be able to avoid emergency surgery. However, to give them a hand, the registrar and the SHO wanted to know more about what was in that abscess. They pondered a CT scan. They then realised that my mouth would open just enough to get a syringe in there… they asked to “drain it a bit”.

The local anaesthetic sprayed into the mouth to “aspirate” an oral abscess is meant to taste like bananas. If your banana crop grows in a bath of dilute acid, maybe you would recognise the taste, but it was pretty horrid. My mouth numbed a bit, and then I grabbed onto my chair whilst they did what they had to do - twice - and removed a sizeable amount of horrid stuff.

I won’t lie, if you ever need this doing, you need to prepare yourself. You need to breathe through the nose, and know that it will be over in 30 seconds. It is not at all comfortable. But you’ll live, and you’ll feel better within minutes.

Within 4 minutes, I could move my jaw more, and suffered less pain. I could swallow again. Alas, because they might want to do surgery in the morning, I was kept on “Nil By Mouth” (NBM), for the evening.

I was now on a regular rotation of saline to hydrate me, paracetamol on IV to take the pain away, and extraordinarily strong (and expensive) antibiotics to help fight the infection. My temperature remained high, my pulse remained high, and my blood pressure was high. I think at this point I was around 38-39C, 120bpm (resting), and blood pressure of about 170/100. Despite not having eaten in several days, my glucose levels were high and on one chart I saw the phrase “needs fasting”.

I awoke the next morning to some confusion. Some doctors thought I would go to surgery. Others thought the antibiotics hadn’t had a chance yet. I just wanted it all to be over.

The consultant anaesthetist at this point called around to have a chat. He asked me the usual questions about allergies etc, and all was fine. He asked me whether I had any questions. “What are the risks of general anaesthetic given my size and that I have sleep apnea?”. He froze. “You didn’t mention sleep apnea”. It was important.

To be honest, I have never been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Rebecca noticed it some months ago, when she was awake and I was very much asleep. I would stop breathing for 10, 20, maybe 30 seconds. I would then suddenly start breathing oddly. I phoned Rebecca and asked her to describe this to the consultant and for him to decide if this was important.

He decided it was very important. I was told that the night after my surgery, I would need to be closely monitored, and that meant I would need a bed on the High-Dependency Unit (HDU), which is a sister unit to Intensive Care. This was starting to get a bit scary.

For various reasons, over the rest of the Friday I deteriorated. My canular became very painful in use, suggesting it needed to come out and a new one put in. Because I have “collapsing veins”, this caused some problems. It meant I was effectively off all medication, painkillers and saline for several hours, and I got to the point I could barely talk.

At 5pm, I was taken off NBM and told I could eat/drink what I could manage until midnight. I ordered a meal, and struggled to down a jug of water. 45 minutes later, I was called for surgery - surgery I clearly couldn’t have, given I’d just drank so much water. The meal arrived, and I couldn’t eat it. I was now very low. I had missed the chance of getting to leave on the Saturday, and I felt awful.

The SHO who admitted me was back on shift, and did an amazing job of making sure I was looked after. He attempted to recannulate me himself (and failed), and then tracked down an amazing nurse who “felt” her way around my veins and gave me the most comfortable canular (albeit at a strange angle), I’d had all weekend.

At around midnight I was moved from Ward 1 (full of people with broken arms, legs and skulls and the like), to Ward 55 (in the eye hospital), where I had a private room. It was in here that a nurse - whilst moving me over to another batch of antibiotics as I slept -noticed that I had stopped breathing for a little while and woke myself up. She had witnessed the sleep apnea. By that point I was already booked for HDU after the operation, but good job she saw it either way.

Saturday morning I felt good. I had slept for 4 hours (the most I had managed in over a week), and it was FA Cup Final day.

I then received a visit from an Ear, Nose & Throat specialist. There was concern the chest infection I had prior to the toothache had triggered tonsillitis and that I had a quinsy that would need treatment - that this wasn’t dental at all.

This was the only point I refused treatment. She wanted to aspirate the abscess again. I refused consent on a couple of grounds:

1. Whilst using the tongue depressor to look in my mouth, when I gagged slightly (I have a terrible gag reflex), she thought I was being childish. What she thought I’d do when draining an abscess, I don’t know
2. She said it would be like my previous aspiration “but further back, near the tonsils”, which frankly scared the crap out of me
3. I was going to be in surgery in less than 3 hours. There was no clinical need for me to have this aspiration right there and then. If my surgery had been cancelled, it would make sense, but right now? No.

She was annoyed. She wanted to aspirate (I suspect she wanted to do it for clinical experience reasons as much as anything else), and I didn’t want her to. She went away and spoke to some other doctors on the phone, including the Max Fax team, and they - apparently - sided with me. It was an unpleasant, traumatic and painful procedure that was not needed right now. Phew.

Another anaesthetist turned up, and talked me through what he was going to do when I got to surgery. They wanted to shove a camera through my nose and down my throat. Normally they would have done this whilst I was asleep, but on this occasion they needed to do it whilst I was conscious. I still don’t know why. He remarked it would be “uncomfortable, but not painful”. Hmmm.

As 3pm approached, I settled down to watch the FA Cup Final - the first one my team Manchester City had reached in my entire life. I knew I would probably not see the whole game.

Sure enough, 30 minutes in, the phone call came. Time to get into the gown.

It’s odd when you’ve been sat waiting for days for surgery, and finally its time. I can’t deny that given the procedure to knock me out was going to involve pipes through my nose and throat, and I was going to end up on HDU, and one doctor had already suggested my chances of dying whilst under were “only about 1%”, fear was starting to take hold.

Rebecca didn’t know where she was meant to be going, and so the stress of making sure she was going to be OK built slightly. The move into surgery was not how it should have gone.

In the anaesthetics room, things generally went to plan. More of the banana-tasting anaesthetic to numb the naval cavity and throat. I wasn’t getting groggy quickly enough, so he gave me “a couple of beers” - a small dose of something uber-powerful through my canular. Then the pipe came out. Huge. Closed my eyes. Barely felt anything. Then, a rush of fluid in my chest and I started to cough. Then choke. Then he said it was time for sleep. My last thoughts: “I’m choking, I might die here…”

Waking up in recovery is horrid. You’re disorientated, confused, groggy and feeling miserable. Except now I felt something different. No pain at all in my mouth. I could swallow, pain free. Something worked.

To be honest, what happened next is all a bit unclear. A surgeon told me that the abscess had been taken out, along with my upper right and lower right wisdom teeth. I looked at the clock, and realised I had been under for probably near 2 hours.

The porter who took me down appeared with another patient. He knew I was upset about missing the game. He pointed at me and mouthed “one nil”. Nice afternoon for me then - we’d even won.

I asked for Rebecca to be called. Actually, I couldn’t remember her number off the top of my head, so it was my Mum who was called, who called her. Unusually they allowed her into recovery to see me. We were now just waiting for HDU. I realised then that I was in a HDU bed. Some poor bastards had had to lift me into it whilst I was asleep. Poor them. I hope their backs are OK.

I then got admitted into HDU. HDU is an odd place. They just want to watch you, watch everything you do, all of the time. They measure how much urine you produce. They write down every cough, every movement, and you are kept with a blood pressure cuff and pulse monitor on constantly to check your vitals all the time. I was also on humidified oxygen.

I slept little. You don’t really want to go to sleep if you know you have sleep apnea and you’ve come out from general anaesthetic - you’re worried you might die. During the night my oxygen levels went down to 70%. The nurses woke me a couple of times. In the morning, I was told it was serious enough that I should seek advice about it from my GP, but I was never at any point in any real danger - thankfully.

Then it was a waiting game to be discharged. Patients never get discharged from HDU, and so I was a freak occurrence. To one nurse’s mind, I was the first patient to get up, dress myself, and walk out of the doors of HDU she could remember. I’m glad I was able to.

Since then, I’ve only had to take two paracetamol all week. I am banned from smoking or drinking “fizzy drinks” for another week. The fizzy drink thing is to do with CO2 - bacteria near the site of the abscess and surgery will thrive on it, so no soda, lager or tonic water for me for a while.

On the whole, I’m fine. It was horrific, and I would never want to do it again, but that’s the story - scary as it was at the time - of how a toothache got out of hand, and I ended up on a high-dependency unit.

The role of heroes has been occupying my mind this week. 

On Monday night I attended Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at the Royal Exchange. It’s a marvellous production, and despite the few moments where forced American accents inevitably slipped it, is a performance I would recommend to anybody.

In Miller’s play, he tries to present to us about a rather unconventional type of hero and the fate his character dictates. 

A hard-working man, with a strong moral and ethical code, suddenly finds his authority challenged. In his mind his authority is his essence, the totality of his identity. He lies out of self-interest, which reduces his heroic quality in the eyes of others, but he only care about his “name” and his “respect”. It’s not a nice heroism, it’s not the kind of heroism we were taught as children when hearing stories of princes and dragons, but there is something definitely heroic here: being true to your sense of right and wrong against all odds.

Whilst I was watching this play - a play I think might be the best I’ve seen at the Royal Exchange in many years - Adam Curtis’ newest creation was being beamed into homes across the land. I caught up with it on getting home and was surprised to discover the subject of heroes being discussed once more.

In the first episode of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Curtis introduces us to the idea that the dominant force behind the rise of both highly speculative financial markets and Silicon Valley in the latter half of the 20th century, were the ideas of Ayn Rand.

Rand was without doubt a fascinating writer. In fact, she might be better described as a philosopher who uses the rhetorical form of novels to present her ideas, more than “just” a writer. A rare kind of thinker, indeed.

Her novels are about heroes. Her style of hero is very distinct: there is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to discussing them.

Rand’s heroes, like Miller’s, are heroic because they act out of self-interest. They believe themselves to be entirely rational and base their morality on that rationality. I think morality of pure self-interest is by definition subjective and selfish, however Rand’s arguments have something to them.

I’m still thinking about these philosophies. I love the idea of any individual choosing to become a hero - a Randian hero - and to do as the early winners in Silicon Valley and did. At the same time, Miller’s presentation of such a character who is unable to climb out of the economic constraints he finds himself imprisoned by, left me feeling such men are selfish, proud and contemptible characters.

I share these thoughts to hopefully make you do two things:

1. If you can, go and watch A View From A Bridge at the Royal Exchange. It’s wonderful theatre. If you’re not nearby, at least go and read the script. Some say a reading of the script is better than seeing the play, but I really think the production at the Royal Exchange is worth seeing.
2. If you can, go and watch Adam Curtis’ documentary (at the time of writing, it’s still on iPlayer if you’re in the UK). It’s wonderful, thoughtful, and at points quite witty. 

Both will make you think, if nothing else.