Thursday 26th March 2009

Interesting news today ...

Apparently the surgeon has discussed my case with my oncologist, and she has taken a look at the histology report, and her view is that I don't need any further treatment. It seems that I will not be being referred to any other specialist, and I won't need the close monitoring that the surgeon was talking about. Her view is that I will just stay under the surgeons care and will have a standard, post-surgical follow-up cycle.

Whilst this sounds like good news, I'm also quite surprised given the information I have had so far.

I will have a meeting with the oncologist to discuss all this (no date as yet), as I now have a hundred questions, but if this is her expert view, I guess that means that she is not worried about any immediate recurrence.

Hopefully this is good news. However, I can't help feeling a little disappointed that it seems I am not going to be a "rare and important special case" after all :(

As I type this, I'm like an excited child on the eve of his birthday. I am anticipating the arrival of my new bass via courier tomorrow and I am looking forward to spending the day testing it out. Conversely, Vanda is not looking forward to me spending the day testing it out and is contemplating an impromptu shopping session.

As an aside, for anyone reading this who is a music fan, I made the discovery of the century today. After seeing an article on the TV, I downloaded a free application called Spotify (www.spotify.com).

This is like a huge, internet-based iPod, with 8 million tracks pre-loaded on it. Once you have downloaded the small app, you can search by artist, song, album etc, and play the results immediately without waiting for download. It's completely free (although there are occasional ads, which you can avoid by paying for the premium service) and totally legal.

The reason they can do this is that you can't download the songs, only play them on your computer, so you have to be by a PC or laptop with an active internet connection (i.e. you can't copy them to your iPod etc). I have my PC in my office, and a laptop connected to the system in the lounge and it works fine from both. You create playlists etc just like on your iPod, and they are saved in the internet cloud, meaning that if I create a playlist on the laptop in the lounge, it immediately appears on my office PC too.

There are some artists who aren't on the system (Frank Zappa one notable exception), but almost everything else I tried was there in abundance. Very, very easy to use and entirely cool! Allows you to listen to that new song or album before buying it, or to find songs or albums you were not even aware of.

I am a huge fan of "different" cover versions of well-known songs - for example, Dread Zeppelin (reggae versions of Led Zeppelin songs) and I've been able to search for a song and find loads of different versions that I wasn't aware of. Excellent stuff!

By the way, no charge for today's free tip. Tomorrow, you pay ...

Cheers,

Colin