Nuts, Gradings and Conferences

Time for one of those gruesome personal postings I feel...

It's been a busy old week all told. On monday I was lucky enough to meet some of the lovely NHS staff at the Hallamshire Hospital walk in centre, and then a lovely couple of paramedics, and then the amazing staff in the Northern General A&E ward. You're all F*****g amazing, lovely people with amazing professionalism and committment, and doing an incredibly hard job in very difficult circumstances. The cause of all this trouble? Well I was unlucky enough to somehow get some nuts in my lunch. Alas, my baaad habit of having far too many chillis in dinner somewhat disguised the taste so the first I knew about it was the unfortunate swelling lip feeling you get. It was a truly unusual experience, as I only really felt slightly unwell, and wandered up to the walk-in centre just to see if they might be able to give me something a bit stronger for the reaction. Initially, they said it was fine and just to watch it. However, some hour or so later, as I was walking back into town a full on reaction set in, so I popped back up to the walk-in centre where they sorted me right out. For some unknown reason, my oxygen saturation levels weren't returning to normal, and I had a quck whiz up to the hallamshire with a couple of lovely paramedics, who did a great job of keeping me more or less awake enough to enjoy screaming through the rush hour traffic :) So that was enough excitement for one day :)

And Tuseday was my second GJR grading, which was HAAARD! but ultimately very enjoyable and rewarding. Watching Glen and his grading was amazing, especially the kata, but everyone really shone, and put in the effort called for on an occaision like that. Beers all round in the pub afterwards, and that great feeling of being a part of something you only get when pushed so hard you have to produce your best stuff. I can only hope my performance wasn't enhanced by the frightnening volume of steroids I'd had the day before ;)

Today.. well thats my first day at ALT-C. Should have been here yesterday, but wasn't feeling 100% after mondays activities. The conference is pretty enjoyable. I'm mainly here for the folksonomies vs controled vocabs and repositories presentations. Quite a nice atmos at the conference. Some interesting LOM/XML things going on, and some ePortfolio presentations that I really should track, although the more I get into that the more it seems like jena/RDF is a much better tool for it. Not bumped into any of the SAKAI people from the Austin conference, which is a pity, was hoping to catch up with some of them.. time yet I guess.