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Humans are strange. Whether we are brilliant at what we do or not we all like to feel indispensable. I like to feel that way and in fact I thought that I was indispensable in every aspect of my life.
This feeling keeps me going, it keeps me driven and alive and I am insistent that no one can do what I do they way that I do it. But then you get ill (as I am) and you are forced to lie down at home with your email from work as your only tool. It is in this state of incapacitated illness that I have realised that no one is indispensable. Absolutely no one. There are many people who can do my job even though they might be unhappy at the prospect of doing my job, they still do it.
My point is this: Take time off when you want to because life is not about becoming indispensable.
Becoming indispensable is impossible and that is reality. Everyone is replaceable in any job even the president, hell, especially the president should be, can be and is replaceable. I also think that it is necessary for companies to occasionally remind their employees that they need to perform consistently well because if they don’t there is someone else who can do the same job for less pay.
It’s strange how one thing can become such a massive focus in ones life. Mumps is this strangeness for me at this point in my life.
Let me tell you why I am blogging about mumps again: There is no medication. There is no cure. There is nothing that can help me. All that I can do is take dulling painkillers.
Mumps is known to have made men sterile. This is rare but it does happen. I am even more baffled, concerned and downfounded by this news. How is it that an illness that can make me sterile has no cure? I was told by my doctor that if I begin to feel pain in my testicles there is really nothing that can be done but this is “rare” and we should pray that this doesn’t happen.
Well gee flipping thanks doc. Welcome to the 21st century!
I am going to be at home, housebound with no other options until at least Monday. I bought myself a new Xbox360 game, I can’t really eat, I can’t smoke, I can’t really sit up or lie down, I can’t go out and get a DVD, I can’t blog excessively cause firstly that’s boring and secondly that involves sitting up for an extended period of time.
My question is then what can a person with mumps do for 10 days?
Edreams was the first choice to experiment with. I decided to buy myself Tony Hawk Project 8. Firstly let me say, WHAT A GAME. I think that this is one of the best games I’ve played in a while. It’s creative, different, interesting, cutting edge and very user-controlled.
Then on to the Edreams issue. There was none. Not a single issue. It makes life easy when shopping online if you have access to a credit card (preferably your own).
Simply enter your street address for delivery and pay via credit card and your set. The most impressive thing about this site is that I received my game in under 24hours. Brilliant.
I also received a call from a nice guy called Dillon at 9am yesterday to confirm that I would be home to receive the game, or someone else could receive it for me if I wasn’t home. About an hour after the call I happily received my game, popped it in and played Project 8.
Today’s update post features a pic of me today and a caricature I had done last year in October in France. That artist had it spot on if he was looking in to the future!
I registered a while back to test out mylivesearch’s new site and claims that they can whip Google’s ass.
At the first hurdle they have failed, they have dropped the ball and come up with no results…without me even having searched anything.
I received the email this morning and followed the link to register on the site. I entered my email, username, password and all the other data they requested and then this happened:
Are you kidding me? mylivesearch doesn’t support Mac or Firefox? I am currently using both and was when I registered. If this is the case then I truly believe that mylivesearch has somewhat missed the boat.
After all the hype and reading all the previews and talk from the big tech blogs I am really disappointed. Maybe the beta version is closed to Windows users but I can’t think why or maybe developers just haven’t finished their compatibility checks and improvements. Whatever it is I think they need to sort it out soon.
And after all of this they now they have my data and I am sure will be bugging me in the very near future and for a very long time.
Apparently with mumps comes time to redesign your blog! So as of this evening you will see a new look and feel for nicharalambous.com.
Something smoother, cleaner, more generic and simple. Colour is sporadic and I have chosen to move things back to a very basic feel.
Did a bit of customisation here and there, tweaked the style.css and the images that build the theme. And what do you know, I have a new theme. I think I’ll be tweaking it more and more as things progress. But I like what it has turned in to and hope that it has become easier to read, understand and subscribe.
Let me know what you think.
Oh, one of the main reasons for the redesign is that I realised that I have only been working with Wordpress since January of this year. It’s really incredible what one can learn in eight months. I have done a boat load of template designs, redesigns and tweaks since I put the old nicharalambous.com theme. So I thought it necessary to work on my own blog since my skills are somewhat improved from the last time I did this!!
When I went to the doctor yesterday he very swiftly mentioned that I will only feel worse as the days go by and then I’ll get better.
Boy was he right. Couldn’t sleep last night, went to bed at 2 am. Woke up consecutively at 05:30, 06:00, 06:30 and the woke up properly at 7am. That’s no fun. When you are sick you are meant to be able to sleep late and long hours. Not so much.
How does one actually sleep when it’s both sides of your jaw that are sore and in contact with the pillow? I’ll tell you; you don’t.
The best part of all of this is that I really just want to get to work so I can get the next edition of FM Campus out. But I can’t cause I’ll infect the whole office. That’s bad. So I am working from home.
Oh, and I realised at some point yesterday that if I am not careful mumps could make me sterile. NICE.
So I have just been diagnosed with mumps. Why is it that I always seem to come down with an illness on a Saturday, and the go to the doctor on a Sunday when it costs an arm and a leg. And murphy’s law it’s something serious.
No work, no leaving the house, no nothing until the swelling goes down. Incase you don’t believe that I am swollen… have a look:
I have noticed that over the last 4 or 5 months over the weekends my blogs drop significantly in visits.
This is definitely due to the lack of blogging that I do over the weekend, but I think it is also due to the fact that many people like to leave their computers and the internet alone over the weekend. They don’t check their RSS and they don’t visit the blog aggregators. This means they don’t necessarily read your (or my) blog.
Is there value in blogging over the weekend? Is it actually important. I even find that the international blogs that I subscribe to calm their blogging down over the weekend. Will people even read what you post, or simply wait until Monday when they get to work and read their RSS readers?
I am not convinced about the value of blogging. I think that I would much much rather post a good blog post on a Monday when I know that people will read and comment than post it over the weekend with little response.
I am surprised that I have never seen this video before. It is interesting and a true while being a load of codswallop at the same time.
The video is titled: Epic 2014
It talks of Google and Amazon forming Googlezon while Mircrosoft tries to compete. New York Times competes with Googlezon’s new media algorithsms in the supreme court and lose, they subsequently go offline in protest to a hegemony that is dominating media and democracy where everyone has access to everything all the time.
