Perhaps it’s simply the word ‘failure’ that needs addressing: let’s change the name of the diagnosis to ‘reduced cardiac success’ and see if that makes any difference.

Dr Tony Copperfield, Sick Notes

Wow, you wait months for a post, and then get an X Factor liveblog. Yikes.

For something a little more like everything else I write, you might want to look at some contributions to The Pod Delusion that I’ve made and forgotten to point to – listen here and here.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

I’m on The Pod Delusion again this week, talking about something… esoteric. And a bit political. Why not have a listen?

I may or may not post an edited transcript on here at some point… I promised a while ago to make a point of doing so, but haven’t been great at keeping it up 😉

I’ve just noticed that my (infamous) YouTube video of Gordon Brown picking his nose has now been viewed over half a million times – 581,610 times to be precise – on YouTube alone. That’s on top of it’s appearance on Newsnight, and pretty much everywhere in 2007. It’s had 2,584 comments – more than the rest of the site put together.

It’s quite clearly the most successful thing ever to come from this site: A video of someone picking their nose. Crazy!

I’ve made a couple of changes to the site’s layout, of which I hope you will approve.

Most noticeably, I’ve tidied up my handwriting a bit – if only it was so easy in real life! It is still very much my hand, but I’ve straightened out the baseline and reduced some of the letter spacings to more closely reflect actual handwriting. There are a couple of other tiny changes, too – it’s an addictive business, tweaking a font!

Also, I’ve stopped DailyBoothing. I’m not self-obsessed enough to take a photo of myself everyday as it turns out… Though notice that I am egotistical enough to keep a static photo in the corner up there… And to have a site of thousands of pages all devoted to me, of course…

As always, your comments on the above, plus the multitudes of other tweaks around the site, are most welcome!

So I’ve decided to experiment with DailyBooth for a while, and stuck a big picture of myself in the sidebar.

While I get the impression that I’m about ten years too old to join in the DailyBooth phenomenon, I have been thinking for a while that I should stick a picture in the sidebar since I’m trying to make the site seem a bit more ‘personal’, with the handwriting and all… And this way, I get to play with a new website, and don’t have to stare at the same picture of myself for too long.

The implementation is clearly a bit slapdash at the moment (and I know my collar’s wonky in the first picture), but let me know your thoughts – is this a change for the better, or does my face make you want to vomit?

There’s a new episode of The Pod Delusion out today – and I feature in it, talking about assessment of junior doctors. It also features Richard Dawkins, which is quite exciting, and lots of other things too. You know you want to listen.

Just a quick note to confirm that I am indeed still alive and well following my overdose… eating a few teaspoons-worth of sugar evidently doesn’t do much harm.

If you enjoyed the video, you’ll probably also like Episode 19 of the Pod Delusion which is out today. It doesn’t feature me this week, which is probably a good thing, and has lots more coverage of 10²³ Check it out!

I’ve recorded a bit on IT in the NHS for this week’s Pod Delusion. Other topics covered include “The Big Freeze”, Google, and ITV’s regions – how can you resist?

I intend to try and remember to add a note here each time I contribute, given that this site was intended to bring all of my writing from all over the internet into one repository – even if that ideal has never really come to fruition.

Plus, I wanted an excuse to use this ‘Diary’ template which hasn’t seen service in some considerable time, but which I think is rather pretty. So there.

May Christmas be all you want it to be, and may 2009 bring peace, joy and prosperity to you and all around you. Merry Christmas, everyone! «