Wednesday 23 August 2000

Pic of the day: Hey, they said I could make annotations in my e-book!

Penicillin & E-books

Temporarily back to slice of life. Yesterday, my sinus infection got worse and worse, and I started to take it seriously. I called my regular doctor, and was offered an appointment for September 18. That's nice, but if I lived to September 18, I really did not need to see the doctor at all. So I called the local medical center in Søgne, the county where I live. I immediately explained the situation, and the young woman in the telephone said I could get an appointment the same day. In 15 minutes, in fact.

Now I could not be there in 15 minutes, since I was at work in town, and besides I don't have a car. (See yesterday's entry about not having a car.) Not that I could legally drive from here to there in 15 minutes even with a car. But it was not a big problem - it always takes somewhat longer than planned with the patients too. So I still spent a while in the waiting room.

The doctor rapped various bones in my face and listened to the sound. He agreed with my dentist as to the diagnosis, an infection in the lateral sinuses on the left side. (The equivalent Norwegian word, "kjevehule" would literally translate as "jaw cavern", which is certainly not a word I recognize from English literature.) The doctor wrote a prescription for penicillin, starting as soon as possible and continuing for 10 days. I paid and went over to the apothecary (a drugstore that, unlike American drugstores, only sells drugs and other medical equipment). The whole thing was very quick and efficient: The drugstore is in the same building.

At this point it was almost 4 PM, so I did not go back to work. Instead I bought a lot of yoghurt and went home. The penicillin tasted horribly, btw. There's not much chance that children will mistake it for candy.

***

Today the pain is little more than a memory, and the pressure is gone. There is still some congestion, but I could easily live with this for centuries without complaining (more than usual). I could be tempted to stop the penicillin cure right now. That would however be a grave disservice not just to myself, but to humanity as a whole.

You see, at this point a lot of bacteria are already dead, but there are still a lot of them alive. And those would be the ones who are best able to resist the antibiotics. If I let them go now, they will flourish again, and exchange genes among each other. (Yes, bacteria do that too, though less romantically.) Over time, you'll have bacteria combining various genes that give resistence to penicillin. Far better then to decimate them as fast as safely possible, to the point where the immune system can mop up the rest. No prisoners!

Another side to this is to not start an antibiotics cure unless you are determined to see it through, and unless you really need it. Here in Norway, antibiotics are used quite sparingly. There must be a diagnosed bacterial infection, and it must be a real threat to life or limb. Antibiotics are not used preventively with pure viral infections like the common cold or the flu. Nor are they used in those cases where the immune system is clearly able to do the task itself, such as minor and superficial infections. Sadly, not all countries have this restrictive practice, and so a lot of people around the world take antibiotics almost like vitamins. The result is multi-resistant bacteria, which then spread by plane all around the world.

But I'm doing my best to not contribute to those. As long as my life's not on the line, that is.

***

Not sure how other languages handle this, but in Norwegian it is traditional to pronounce penicillin as "pensilin", without the first i. The reason for this is left as an exercise for the reader.

***

In utterly unrelated news, I've spent much of the evening with the Microsoft Reader for E-books. The thing is freee, and you even get a free e-pocket dictionary, or is that pocket e-dictionary. Anyway, it's freee. I found it on Barnes & Noble, though I had to download the pocket Encarta from Microsoft.

Basically, the Microsoft Reader lets you read e-books from a portable PC (or indeed any PC) instead of buying a dedicated reader, such as the Rocket. Now in all honesty, I don't have a portable small enough for this to be a realistic option. My Toshiba is a laptop, and simply too large for the bus. I'm not likely to buy a Jornada or some such simply to read e-books. But it's sort of cool to read e-books even at home.

I've told you before that I eagerly look forward to the phasing out of paper books. They take an insane lot of space. My entire apartment is filled almost exclusively by books and magazines, none of which are even searchable by keywords. What a waste of space! True, the quality of computer screens (and especially LCD) is not quite on the level of paper. But it's good enough for me, even at the advanced age of 41. If I could switch to e-books and e-magazines from this night on, it would not be a day too early for me. I'd even buy a book-sized PC or a dedicated reader (credit cards, here we come). But right now, the titles are not quite there.

***

So, how was Microsoft Reader? Well, as you may have guessed: Small. It retains the traditional proportions of a book, by and large, in this case a paperback. This makes for familiarity, but it does not use the screen very efficiently. I'd like for it to display two pages beside each other - my paperbacks tend to do that from page 2 onward. And there is certainly enough screen estate on my Toshiba. Again, I guess this may stem from optimization for the smaller handheld computers.

In the same vein, I found that I could not reduce the font size any further, even though I would have been willing to compromize easy reading for less frantic clicking. This is really a page-turner. Luckily you can turn the page by a variety of means, from clicking the mouse in the upper right corner to simply pressing the space bar. Oooh, space bar! That makes me think of science fiction.

Anyway, I could get used to this fairly quickly. There is even a "riffle" function that lets you open the book by a visual cue to how far into the text you have read. Much like you open a physical book knowing that you have read about a third, and then quickly look around to see if you hit the right page. Or jump to any give side number, or bookmark, or annotation. Or even drawing. You can make your own drawings, in color no less. You can not yet drool on the pages, though.

Given the support for color drawings, I'm astounded that you cannot change the background color from white to some nice pastel. I tried to do it from the Windows screen properties, which works well enough for Notepad and Wordpad and such. But the book remained stubbornly blinding white. Why presume my preferences when you don't need to? Listen, if we wanted a book, we'd buy a book. We want more than a book, because it is possible.

Says the guy who stays with the tried and tested elements of good old HTML as much as possible. Hey, I have converted my running diary to CSS, so y'all can tinker with it if you want a personal reading experience, such as reading all song lyrics in blood red demibold calligraphy. I'd appreciate a similar courtesy in my e-books. Then again, this is Microsoft, and the competition is not exactly intense yet. I may or may not find something much better later, such as after an emotional outburst from one of my faithful readers. :)

Anyway, thanks for keeping me company tonight.