So naturally being a complete tech geek, I found this out whilst ‘Googling’ for the Out Of Hours information. Did I find it? well, no not really. The problem with technology these days, is that we become so reliant on it that we forget about the other simpler means of finding information out. Like picking up the telephone for example.

Here’s what I did to try and work out what was going on with my ear. It’s a long list but I need to illustrate something, just be patient.

1: Google for symptoms
2: Google for possible home remedies to said symptoms
3: Google for “out of hours doctor cardiff”
4: Panic because I can’t find anything other than medicare insurance plans
5: Resort to trying said home remedies and thus making the problem worse
6: Call my GP, get their out of hours number ring said number, be told I have to call a cardiff GP surgery because I was out of catchment area
7: Google for my mothers local Cardiff surgery
8: Panic because I can’t find it
9: Resort to calling any GP, getting the generic number, making emergency appointment and forgetting to tell them I am a visiting patient
10: Go to appointment, panic, complications, get some sort of prescription

This, is not really how it should have been. Here’s the process as it should have been.

1: Call my GP, be told I am out of catchment area and call Cardiff GP
2: Pull out phonebook
3: Call GP get out of hours number, call it and make appointment
4: Go

Of course, something as simple as pulling out a phonebook never occurred to me, because of course I’ve become so reliant on technology, I forgot such a thing exists. So I ended up spending hours trawling through the websites. I eventually found the page I needed which told me everything I needed to know far too late, the service I have called tonight.

And then of course there is the problem of self diagnosis. I was able to find out that my symptoms could be any number of things, from a simple ear infection, a perforated ear drum, to massive disfigurement, brain tumour or worse (although whats worse than a brain tumour I will leave to your imagination).

Now, I’m going to be hypocritical here and say “I do have enough common sense to know I shouldn’t self diagnose” and I had enough ‘common sense’ to only try the home remedy of getting sterile olive oil in case it was a wax buildup. But then, I didn’t have enough common sense to check the phonebook for local listings before trying the internet.

I’ve done this in the past as well, gone looking for so much information that I’ve ended up never finding what I need, looking for parts, looking for electronics stores, looking for stockists of various things. I’m often left wondering just how much time I’ve wasted, and indeed how much stuff I’ve missed out on just by not pulling out the phonebook. Indeed now I have I find a page in there entitled “NHS OUT OF HOURS SERVICE CALL THIS NUMBER”. That would have saved so much time.

This of course, is the problem of simply Googling things. Perhaps we all need to downgrade a little. So, next time I need something or, if you need something, check your phonebook first.

Update: Just to let you know I was fine, severe ear infection that’s going to be treated with a huge dose of antibiotics and an antibiotic ‘wick’ (Google said nothing about one of those! but most of the symptoms were right for some of Googles results)

As a result, on both thelongmile and CardiffTweetups a donate button from Paypal has been implanted, unobtrusively into the sidebar.

I’ve also placed a Google Adsense widget into the sidebar of CardiffTweetups and into the footer of thelongmile.

These ads are design to be unobtrusive, whilst helping to generate revenue to keep this site and my other sites going. Donations are used for me to keep the site going, and for building onto projects like CardiffTweetups which has more than exceeded initial expectations. Expansion is not only “a good idea” it’s also now a requirement.

This is all the adverts will ever be for the foreseeable future, and I will NEVER EVER put a pop-up or pop-under advert on the site. I hate them enough as it is.

So please, I ask if you are feeling generous, to donate a small amount to help support thelongmile Group, and if you have time, just click on the ad’s

This website uses two different stats plugins untill I work out which one is more accuratte. Statpress Reloaded, and WassUp. Right now, I’m not getting a result from anything. At least not one thats consistant.

Statpress is reporting 544 Pageviews, whilst Wassup is reporting 710 Pageviews. Google Analytics is reporting 50!

Now if we look at my own web hosts satistics for April, as the site went live on the morning of April second…

AwStats is reporting 2335!! page views whereas analog is reporting 166 page veiws…

Note that this isn’t the indication of the hits on the site… because then it gets even worse… Neither Wassup or Statpress Reloaded are capable of monitoring the actual hit count, so if we look at AwStats and Analog, their stats are also completley different.

AwStats Reports 8782 hits, wheras analog is reporting 3390

Absolutely nothing is matching up right now. So I’m at a loss as to what to do. I’ve implemented google analytics again using a different plugin as the old one stopped working for absolutley no reason, hence the low pagecount value and luckily the anylitcs code is now appearing in all of the pages. But something is very much amiss. Untill this problem gets fixed I can’t make any changes to the site or upload the galleries. It’s not a limiting factor, but the stats help me track how popular a site is on any given day, where the links are coming from, deciding why people are visiting, as well as working out the sites worth and value for potential advertising and service selling. If these figures are innacuratte then I cant give that information correctly.

For now I’m going to trust in google anylitics, and hope that over the next 48 hours it returns a consistant result. If all the stat systems were within 50 points of each other, then it would be deemed accuratte enough, however this is a very strange issue… any suggestions? Please leave in the comments below.

Thanks

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