A bit of a scare…

Nov21
by Phil Tann on November 21, 2016 at 7:20 am
Posted In: Uncategorized

So earlier this month we had another MRI done on little Mr and like usual it was a very long day. Into the Michael Rice Centre early for a quick port flush then over to DOSA for admission then the inevitable wait for his scan to start.

Didn’t know just how long the wait would be though…
After going to DOSA at 11 the day was going OK until Alex decided he wanted to “smell the colours” immediately, I knew that it was going to be a while so the diversionary tactics began with limited success. Many cuddles and a lot of sooking about wanting to smell the colours later, I was told that the scan before Alex “had some issues” and we would be delayed a bit further which isn’t a good thing when you have a grumpy little man waiting.

When 2:30 rolled around and we were the last ones bar none in DOSA, I knew the next doctor roaming in would be for us which was a good thing since I was getting very hungry and considering eating some furniture. Through to the Radiology waiting area we went which appeased him at least briefly and from there the day (aside from painfully long) was pretty much a standard afternoon.

  • Dash to the cafe for lunch
  • Do some emails etc
  • Head for the Day Surgery recovery area and wait for the call

He was NOT a happy camper when he woke up, but that’s par for the course. Since his shunt was changed early in the new year, after an MRI his shunt needs to be re-programmed each time he has a scan. Not a big deal really; but when he’s tired, grumpy and generally had a gut-full of the world for the day – that one more person touching him is not easy to negotiate. EVENTUALLY we left the hospital at 6:40pm and headed home.

It was only a couple of days later that I got a phone call saying all was well with the lesions being monitored showing no measurable change. Great news so I was fist pumping and celebrating until… “Oh by the way, there was some mention on the report of highlighting that wasn’t previously showing on scans”.

Oh shit…

Alex’s oncologist then went on to explain that it could be vascular and that until the scan is reviewed in more detail we shouldn’t worry too much. Bit of a *gulp* moment and tried to lock that out of my brain as I was in the Gold Coast for an SES conference for the next 3 days. While busy that was ok, but not a lot of sleep and the constant “What if” moments creeping into my brain (Our friends from MRC will recognise these all too well…) we were called in for a meeting to discuss the results and have a follow up 11 days later.

The upshot is the highlighting IS vascular and there really was nothing to worry about. The lesions are all stable and we’re talking about months down the track versus the weeks and sometimes days from a couple of years ago. Based on the results and a few other factors we’re looking at another scan in March to follow up progress (highly preferable; LACK of progress) with the lesions and after that presuming all is well, we’ll extend the following scan to 6 months and take his port out between the March and September scans.

So it was a bit of a scare, but all is well…
Thanks as always to everyone who continues to send love and support as we have our good and bad days in the continuing journey.
Phil, Jo, Jenny and of course – Alex!

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Technical Opinion: Allo may be more than it appears to be!

Sep25
by Phil Tann on September 25, 2016 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Android, Computing

allo

Allo is here and it’s a nice looking app, but we can’t help but feel there’s something … missing. While the look of the app is really slick and the interface is nice, there have been some negative comments on the reviews around the web and that seems to be representative the feedback we’re seeing at the moment.

So what is missing?

The first thing we think Allo probably should have, and doesn’t, is the ability to be used on more than one device at a time. Even something as simple as SMS can be (kind of) multi device, with the use of apps like Pushbullet to let you send SMS from your tablet or your desktop.

Popular third party messenger apps all have varying degrees of multi-device capability; Telegram works seamlessly across multiple devices, desktops, laptops and basically every modern device that exists. Facebook Messenger works well across platforms simultaneously too. Even WhatsApp (which never used to work on multiple devices) allows you to message from another device using their web interface.

Allo has none of this.

Leaving out integration with SMS seems to have been a major disappointment. Everyone has been waiting for Google to introduce an answer to iMessage for Android, and Allo was thought (perhaps in error) to be that answer. Well, it isn’t.

In Australia, at least, SMS is generally free (or unlimited) for most mobile users, so having some sort of easy SMS bypass really doesn’t matter that much. Elsewhere, this might be more of an issue, but in Australia? Not really.

Allo is missing a ‘killer feature’ draw users to Allo from other products

Allo, as a messenger service, really isn’t significantly different to anything else out there. There’s stickers, file sharing, secret messages, self destructing messages and more. It’s like Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and basically every other messaging service that’s been around for years in that respect.

Where it does differ is the inclusion of Google Assistant, or in other words, a natural language processing bot powered by Google. It’s kind of like Google Now, but in your chat. But is it that great? Adam Turner from the Sydney Morning Herald nailed it when he said

“As a chat app, Google Allo will struggle to stand out from the crowd, but Google Assistant certainly has the potential to win people over”

… which leads to the next important points when it comes to Allo.

Let’s talk about Google Assistant

The Google assistant is currently sitting somewhere between gimmick, niche and outright brilliance and as a component of the Allo app, it has received its fair share of feedback and criticism.

The gimmick side is covered when you look at the work of our Editor in Chief at Ausdroid who spent reasonable time with the app prior to its public release put together a list of fun things to do with Google Assistant.

It’s niche, because Google Assistant doesn’t really do anything that you can’t already get Google to do. How many of us honestly want to interact with Google via a chat interface? OK Google and Search work just fine, and I don’t feel a need to message Google to get the same results.

Of course, there are benefits to the Assistant way; you don’t have to be online — you can queue up a request and Google will get back to you when you’re back in a signal area. But for most of us, those circumstances are few and far between, making the benefits of a chat interface to Assistant somewhat less useful.

For me, the brilliance is the development of the voice recognition from Google Now and Android Wear which are leaps ahead of previous iterations of the function, into what is now a naturally interactive experience. The recognition extends to not only the words you’re saying but the natural flow of speech and even Australian accents now.

Did Google intend to compete with other messaging apps, or is it up to something else?

This got me thinking, what if Google don’t necessarily want it to be a competitor to Whatsapp? What if they don’t want it to be a replacement for your SMS application? What if what users are seeing as features missing is very deliberate on the part of Google to ensure that they don’t have eighty million users? Perhaps what they’re looking for is some real world test cases for only a single component of Allo. When I backtracked to Google I/O this year and thought about the announcements, looked at the interface and active components there is something that stands out to me – Google Home.

Google’s internal testing can only account for so much data, so…

How good would it be to get the Assistant out there in the wild, gathering data and in particular voice input from real world users for analysis and the long term better capability of Google Home which has the very real possibility of being a blockbuster product for Google and a lifestyle change for users.

I believe that Allo may be a sacrificial lamb, sent out to slaughter in order to get a heap of very useful, real world data pumped into the Google Assistant which is the centrepiece of Google Home. Knowing full well that they would get data smashed in for a short period of time, perhaps only a day or two for some users then dwindling down to the steady flow of data that they’ll get from the faithful few who will continue to use the app steadily (providing more and more data to Google to improve the product) because they have a few acquaintances who will do so with them.

So while on the surface it may be a feature lacking product, before you judge it too harshly based on what you see – Think about what you don’t see and what could be behind the product. When I took the time to think about it, I found a potential explanation as to why a company that deals with generally outstanding products would release one that is seemingly well below par for them.

Do you think this is a plausible explanation for Allo’s apparent failure to deliver on expectations, or have Google simply dropped the ball?

Thanks to one of Chris Rowland, Dep. Editor in Chief of Ausdroid (and friend) for your assistance putting the structure of this piece together.

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“It’s all good, no discernible change”

Jun16
by Jo Tann on June 16, 2016 at 6:00 pm
Posted In: Personal

Tuesday was MRI day. A long day.

Into DOSA (Day Of Surgery Admissions) at 7.30, he was, as per usual, second on the list. This time around we had a little bit of a twist, Alex’s port needed flushing. Rather than have to go upstairs after his MRI, put numbing cream on, wait for 30 mins and then be accessed and flushed, the lovely nurses in DOSA said they could access and flush his port before his MRI and then they could use his port line for the anaesthetic rather than put a cannula in his hand (which he hates). Numbing cream went on without a fuss, and while we were waiting for it to take effect we saw the lovely Doctor Claire who Alex has been seeing in ENT. We said hello, and since she was there I thought I’d ask her a quick question. Alex had surgery for grommets 5 weeks ago and has had an ear infection ever since. I wanted to know if I should take Alex to the GP to get some oral antibiotics as the drops didn’t seem to be clearing it up. Instead of saying yes yes take him to someone else not my problem, she told me to get one of the nurses to page her before Alex went in for his MRI and she would come and take a look herself!
Once the numbing cream had taken hold we went into the next door ward’s treatment room to be accessed and flushed. Alex was very good and was very patient through the whole procedure, sitting on my lap on the bed very calmly. A nurse appeared at the door and said it was time to go, so off we went to the holding bay. Sitting downstairs we said a quick goodbye to the DOSA nurse who had taken us down and Alex (who knows the routine better than I do) asked to put a sticker on blankie. When children take toys or blankets into a scan like this the staff put a sticker with their name on it just to make sure it stays with them. I said sure no worries and went to get blankie out of my bag. Only problem was blankie wasn’t there. I’m not sure I can convey here the depth of the panic that ran through me. Blankie has been one of the most important things in the world to Alex since before he was diagnosed, a source of comfort and a constant to cling to when everything else was scary and hard. Blankie has got us through a lot of tough situations and to loose her is simply unthinkable (yes blankie is a girl). Leaving Alex with his friend nurse Lyn I raced back upstairs and caught up with the DOSA nurse before she had made it back to DOSA! The only place I could think blankie might have been left was the treatment room where Alex had been accessed. Thankfully that is exactly where I found her. Breathing again for the first time in 5 minutes I headed back downstairs. Alex was chatting happily away to the nurses and was happily unaware of the drama.

Alex has a particular routine when it comes to anaesthesia, he gets to hold the mask to his face, smell all the colours (red, yellow, pink, green, purple, orange and blue), then everyone has to sing the rainbow song. Part way through the song the anaesthtist turns on the gas and he falls asleep just as the song ends. This time, for the first time, he had his port line in and the anaesthtist just attached the syringe of propofol and he was asleep in 10 seconds flat. I wasn’t aware of how fast it would be and hadn’t sung the song or really prepared him for it, he was expecting his usual routine and all of a sudden he was waking up in recovery. Needless to say that he was more than a little bit cranky when he woke up. Nine times out of ten he has a smooth wake up, the tenth one is epic.
When I figured out that he was grumpy about not having his usual routine (which was tricky since he just wanted to yell and scream rather than talk) I managed to get him to sit on my lap, we gave him a mask and ran oxygen through it and sang the rainbow song. After that he calmed down a bit, some more snuggles and a bit of playschool and he was back to being happy.

As we hadn’t had time to page Dr Claire before hand I asked one of the nurses if it was possible to page her now. She actually came in in between patients(!) and had a quick look in his ears. She said to keep up the drops on one side for another 2 days and took a swab of the other side since it was looking a bit nasty. We had an appointment booked for the following week so we thanked her profusely and said we would see her on Wednesday.

After ice cream, jelly and milk we were on our way home.

The waiting is never fun, but fortunately this time the wait was only a few days. Alex’s oncologist – Dr Ram – said it perfectly so I’ll quote him here verbatim;

“It’s all good, no discernible change”

Big smiles all round really

🙂

We saw Dr Claire on Wednesday, turns out that Alex has a yeast infection in his right ear, probably because he has had drops in there for so long! so we are stopping the drops and hoping that the ear will dry out and all will be well.

We’ll keep you posted 🙂

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