Nick Cowie » Personal

My chest filled to explode

Nick — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:40:31 +0000

Apologies to David McComb. For those who do not follow my twitter feed, I will tell you what happened over the past few days.

I was riding to work on Friday morning, when I started having a pain in the chest. Mild pain which I have been getting recently when I push myself on the bike, but because it is accompanied by a bout of nausea, I always put it down as stomach related. Instead it was angina and last Friday morning it did not go away in a couple of minutes after easing the pace.

So I stopped at the nearest train station intending to catch the next train to work. However, the pain did not go away while waiting for the next train and the nausea got worse. So instead I caught the next train home. About 10 minutes into the trip, I realised I was having a heart attack, my chest pains where much stronger, it felt like my lungs where being crushed. I was having trouble breathing and I was losing sensation in my left arm.

I rolled my bike out of the station and got home quickly, dropped the bike off, announced to Angie I was probably having a heart attack and walked across the road to the ambulance depot to get help.

I was then rushed to Fremantle hospital, while being told I should of called the ambulance from the train and they would of come and met me and saved 10 minutes, which could of made a big difference.

The reason I was being rushed to Fremantle hospital instead of Rockingham hospital which was closer, was Fremantle has a specialist coronary care unit, which I got to see at close hand. I was in the Fremantle emergency department for a little over 10 minutes, as the prepared me for surgery. Then I was in surgery, getting a blockage in an artery which supplies blood to the heart cleared and making sure it stayed open by inserting in a steel tube.

Because the operation was only done under local anaesthetic and a big dose of morphine, once I was in post op and I located my phone, I was tweeting about it a little over two hours after I realised I was having an heart attack.

48 hours after the operation, I was out of hospital, with no permanent damage to my heart. My lifestyle is about to change, I need to take drugs to reduce the thickness of my blood, my blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol every day for the rest of my life (even though only my cholesterol was above average). Lose a few kilos and eat less bad cholesterol ( reduce my intake of cheese, eggs, chocolate and fried noodles, because I eat little dairy or milk).

So a big thank you to everybody at the Kwinana ambulance depot, the Fremantle Hospital Emergency Department and Coronary Care Unit, without you I probably would not be alive right now.

It has been awfully quiet round here

Nick — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:22:35 +0000

It has been three months since my last post, and while I have not posted here or at my other blog, I have not abandoned either site.

As I have only worked 50 of the last 100 days, this blog should be full of interesting posts on CSS and other web geekery. Instead nothing, why?

Most of my blog posts are written on the train to and from work. Working less and cycling more has reduced this time from five hours a week to less than two.
Work often provides inspiration for posts, however, instead of working with HTML, CSS or web 2.0, I have been working with JavaScript, jQuery and the intricacies of MySource Matrix workflows. While this keeps me busy, it is not pushing any boundaries or providing material to blog about.
I am spending more time on my other passion, cycling, including acquiring a couple of project bikes to build. While I am happy and confident in my web mechanic skills to blog about building anything web related. My bicycle mechanic skills are limited and I rather not exposed them to the everybody.

So what does this future hold for this blog, well until I my interest in CSS, HTML and web 2.0 topics is fired up, you will see a few cycling related posts. Most will be reviews of cycling related products (I have a couple of c
Crumpler bags to review) as well as some progress reports on my project bikes. It will not be another 100 days of silence.

Google Chrome is frustrating me

Nick — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:41:38 +0000

At work I regularly use Chrome as a second browsers, it is a efficient browser, quick to fire up, small memory footprint and renders standard based web pages correctly. However, it will not replace that memory hog Firefox 3.1 as my main browser. As the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug are the tools of my trade.

I do find it annoying that currently Chrome is only available for windows, which does limit my usage at home. No Chrome for my two Macs, two Ubuntu machines, just leaving the Vista media centre PC chromed at the moment. At least Google indicate Chrome will be available for the Mac and Linux in the near future. So it is a minor nuisance, and not my point of frustration.

What I find frustrating is that even though Chrome is webkit based, it does not always render as other webkit based browsers such as Safari, when you are pushing what can be done with modern web browsers. Case in point, I am a big fan of progressive enhancement with CSS3, if you view my article on Progressive enhancement with CSS3 at Web Mixed Grill, in any browser except Chrome (and IE6 because I was lazy and did not go bug hunting). You will see what is possible, an improved experience for people with better browsers. The problem is that while Chrome supports border-radius and box-shadow and they work in isolation, in combination, the area outside the corner-radius, which is transparent without a box-shadow is now rendered solid black with a box-shadow. It is a known issue since September and I assume at some stage it will be fixed.

Your current browser, Safari 3 and Chrome 1.0 rendering the same element. Over 50% of you will see three circular buttons, around 10% will see a soft drop shadow behind the first button and the 3% using Chrome two black boxes.

This is what I find frustrating, if Chrome did not support border-radius or box-shadow, it would not be a problem, because it would behave like most other browsers in common use now and you could use those properties together for progressive enhancement to browsers that did. If somebody in the Chrome team, said “there is a issue with box-shadow on elements with border-radius, it is going to take time to fix, lets switch off box-shadow on elements with border-radius until we fix it”. Again not a problem, Chrome would have better box-shadow support that Firefox 3, but not perfect. Unfortunately this is not the case, instead Chrome spoils it for everybody, because it breaks using these two properties.

Some people will be of the opinion, why care? 90% of other browsers do not support these properties, if a new browser gets them wrong, so what?

The logic behind progressive enhancement with CSS3 is simply if a property is not supported by a browser, it does not matter, because the browser still get a usable version of the page. Which works fine with all versions of Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 5+ (expect bugs) and 5 year old or less versions of Opera. With Chrome it supports the new properties so badly so, you do not want to use that property combination for other browsers, that do support them properly.

On my way home meme take 2

Nick — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:26:04 +0000

After getting tagged again by Ruth and speaking to Miles who was visiting the State Library to work on his special project. I decided to have a second go at the On my way home meme. This time a more typical trip home, by train and bike, last Friday.

Leaving the library on a Friday evening, there are always a few people using the free wifi outside the building, as the library closes at 5:30pm on Friday.

I walked through the main part of the station on Friday, I need to go past all the other platforms to get to my train.

While waiting for my train, a train on northern line arrived and the crowd descended on it. The train on the northern line takes a lot more passengers than the southern line at the moment.

I got stopped by a security guard at this stage. asking why I was taking photographs. He was not concerned about security issues, but the privacy of the passengers. I explained I wanted a photo of how crowded the northern line was and that my camera was not likely to take photos that could clearly identify people. I demonstrated that by showing him, the photos I had taken.

By comparison, my carriage was almost empty. I was going to demonstrate that with a photograph with a beautiful sunset over the Swan River, but all I got was the reflection off the window. So here is photograph taken a stop earlier. Photos taken, laptop on and headphones on.

Off the train and time to retrieve my bike from the locker. The flash on the Dopod 838Pro is not that effective, so here is a photo taken earlier in the day.

The first part of the ride home is 800m decline down a wide well light road. This photo does not show this interesting obstacles I faced that night, which include two large piles of organic fertiliser on the road’s edge. Each pile was roughly 2m high and 4m in diameter and had a very strong odour. The final obstacle was a burst reticulation pipe, shooting water 4m into the air and covering most the road. So I made an radical detour the wrong way around a roundabout.

The next 600m is a long a crushed limestone track through bushland, that little LED light, gives off enough light to navigate the track at 20kmh, any faster and it gets very interesting.

The next part of the journey, is to hop a couple of curbs to cross this dual carriageway, 100m along a cycle path, 300m uphill along an unlit road, hop a couple more curbs then I am home.

8 things you probably didn’t know about me

Nick — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:37:06 +0000

I got tagged by Ben Winter-Giles with 8 things meme, probably in revenge ;-) for my introduction of him at Web Directions South 07.

For those who haven’t heard about the 8 things meme yet:

The rules :

Link to your tagger and post these rules.
List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Here are eight things you probably didn’t know about me:

I got introduced to hexadecimal at the age of 10 by two computer boffins (hey it was 1971 and anybody used computers was a boffin). The boffins where at a quiet career night with a computerised mathematical quiz. They decided to show a precious 10 year old that you could answer in decimal or hexadecimal. Which went really well for five minutes, until the 10 year typed in “please can I have harder questions” and I crashed my first computer.
I went to high school with Gary aka Tuna aka Man with No Blog. His stream got to do computer programming aka playing with punch cards, I got to do advanced cooking as the only boy in a class of 20 girls instead.
The closest I ever got to any training in graphic design was helping my sister with her assignments while she was studying graphic design in return for help in typing my assignments for my degree in psychology.
I suffered brain damage as the result of a car doing a uturn in front of my moving motorcycle. I have seen the scans my brain is not a pretty sight, there is roughly 10 to 20% that does not work.
I have an exceptional good memory though I do not always show it with words or names. It got me through school and university. I was worried that brain damage was affecting my memory, so I got tested twice after the accident. I was off the scale both times (top 0.1% of population). I freaked out the psychologist who did the tests, by saying I remembered the questions from the intelligence test twelve months earlier, so I googled the answers before attending the second test.
If you are not carefully, I will make appearance on your tv via Rage late at night. I had roles in two Jebediah film clips, Jerks of Attention and Teflon. I am the guy with the bright red hair, leather pants and chained to a sink.
Nickobec which is my username on a lot of forums, came about because I needed an yahoo email address a long time ago when it was limited to 8 characters and nick@yahoo.com was taken, so instead of nick17 which was suggested by Yahoo, I choose nickobec because that was the username I was given for an online FBPro football league I was playing at the time. First four characters of my name, plus four character team moniker for my team the Oberlin Coyotes. My town was chosen based on the record of the Oberlin College football team, which at that stage was 44 game losing streak (a US college record). I started using nickobec in forums whenever nick was already taken. who said I could count ;-)
I do play computer games, but I stick to older ones, I have spent a lot of time playing the original Civilization. Still have not been able to conquer the world, with six other civilizations at the emperor level before 800AD.
Like most of the Perth Port80 Posse I am addicted to Five Senses Coffee. Burton’s Blend is my favourite.

Normally I don’t like tagging people in memes, so this is a clayton’s tag, ignore it, unless you feel the need. Except for Sarah, you need to blog. So in no particular order:

Sarah just to add to the pressure to get her to post to her blog for the first time in a while.
Raena has rebooted her blog (cleaned of the old content) and here is the chance to add new content.
Miles because there are some really unusual random facts about Miles that he let slip during late night socialising session, that need to published.
Kay I just want to find out about the goatlady moniker.
Myles aka Madpilot I want to find the origin of Madpilot.
Bronwen because Browen will beat me up if she missed out ;-)
You, because I never know enough about the people who regularly read this blog.

And I know that is only seven, but sometimes I just feel the need to break the rules.

Twitter did not suck the blogging from me

Nick — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:28:24 +0000

While Molly blames Twitter for her lack of blogging and Mark life, the reason for my lack of blogging of the past few weeks can be attributed to the new train and my desire to get back to a reasonable level of fitness.

Most of my blogging used to be done on the 35+ minute bus ride to and from work. With the new train line the old bus routes where deleted (I will post a flickr photo soon to explain the choice of that term). The closest train station is some 2.5km from house, so my I have been taking advantage of the fact I can take my bike on the train and cycling the 2.5km, 5km, 18km or longer to a station and catching the train to work. The trip home is similar, though with headwinds in the 25+kph range lately, I tend to take the longer train ride, shorter ride home option.

So why has this reduced my blogging, well it is a little difficult to carry both a change of clothes and my laptop on my back for the longer rides, so I usually leave the laptop home. While my phone is quite capable of posting to my blog. The keyboard is not conducive to posts more than a couple of paragraphs. So I have lost my blogging time each day.

So while I have written a couple of posts in an old fashioned notebook, I just have not converted them to an electronic format. More to do with my level of fitness leaving my tired each night and having to spend my time rebuilding my desktop PC, due a dead motherboard.

Will things improve, I hope so, this post was written on my laptop on the way to work, I intend to take my laptop on the train more often, even if it reduces my twittering. And as my fitness improves I should be spending more time in the evening writing and hopefully doing other interesting stuff.

Normal services will resume shortly

Nick — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 11:37:49 +0000

Hopefully things should return to a version of normal this week. Angie has been out of hospital for a week now and I have been adjusting to my new role as chief teamaker and preparer of soft boiled eggs and soldiers.

I have been out and about for a few days, instead of walking around the garden as instructed by her physio, Angie has been getting her exercise by going shopping for DVDs. Her reward for giving up smoking after 20 years, so far she has spent her cigarette money through to August.

I should start posting more regularly here, get the photoblog back running, I have taken photos almost everyday for the past month, I just have not uploaded any or even sorted them. As well as finish a couple of projects, the new West Coast Bloggers template based on a design by Si (it is almost finished guys) and redesign this blog at long last. As well as prepare a presentation on mobile web browsing for the April AWIA/Port80 meeting.

Frustration is

Nick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:18:20 +0000

Seeing someone you love, in pain lying in bed with tubes coming out of them and not being able to do anything.

Current status

Nick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:53:58 +0000

Just a quick post to let my friends know what is happening in my life.

My wife Angie, was admitted to hospital early Wednesday morning with appendicitis. Unfortunately her appendix perforated and together with an adverse reaction to the anesthetic lead to a difficult operation and Angie ending up in intensive care.

The good news is Angie is recovering well, and should be out of intensive care this afternoon. She will be in hospital for at least a week. So I have had to cancel my US trip (SXSW and IASummit) so I can spend the time looking after her.

Not dead yet!

Nick — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 06:35:08 +0000

It has been awfully quiet round here lately, after Andrew K. and Vicki finally posted after many months of silence, I thought I better do something before it gets that long here. I have not given up blogging I have just been busy with other things.

The photoblog, it took a little time to set up, but that was to learn the Sandbox theme for WordPress. it has also taken time to learn the intrancies of web based photosharing services, and find time in my daily schedule to get the photos from the camera, do a little post processing if necessary, upload to flickr or zooomr and write the post. Taking photographs each day is the easy bit and task I am finding increasing enjoyable.
Setting up my new MacBook Pro, after four months of using a brick albeit with a nice 1600x1200 screen running Ubuntu, I have finally got a replacement for my trusty Ti PowerBook. It is just taking time to setup, find the right software for the increased workload it has taken on as my primary development machine.
Getting ready for my SXSW and IASummit trip, not just organising the trip and the week of mountain biking in Moab between the conferences, but trying to improve my fitness and skill levels for Moab.