John Cannell interviewed on CBN, a good introductory video:

Dr. John Cannell talks about infectitious disease and vitamin D in more detail:

Vitamin D Prevents Cancer: Is it true?

This is the introductory video from Grassrootshealth

Sunshine,Solariums (Sunbeds), and Vitamin D. interview with Dr Michael Holick and a few more.

Vitamin D and Prevention of Chronic Diseases, Michael Holick.

Very entertaining and goofy introductory lecture.

What’s a vitamin D deficiency. This goes through in detail deficiency and levels of vitamin D. Should be a good lecture for health practitioners, especially if they’re stuck on old dosages and vitamin D levels.

Johan Moan, a lecture in Norwegian:

How Vitamin D Reduces Incidence of Cancer: DINOMIT Model.

New research that gives cancer patients great hope.

Dr. Joe Prendergast on Vitamin D - he tells an amazing story about a cancer patient

Gabriele Stähler on Vitamin D3, with Bill Ryan : a Project Camelot interview

A different interview, where a German alternative health practitioner talks about her experience with vitamin D

June 2010, update:

A summary of the studies regarding vitamin D, held this year:

And before you go, here’s an important video about magnesium - which you need to supplement while taking vitamin D, and most likely even if you don’t:

I have no medical background. I’ve combined material found on various websites, and drew my own conclusions. It’s basically pure speculation. You need to check the sources and draw your own conclusions, before acting on anything I write here.

How it behaves:

This flu causes mild illness in most people who get infected. It’s said to be milder than normal seasonal flu. So far most young people have gotten sick, which might have to do with initial spread patterns, or they’re more likely to catch it, we don’t know yet. A few get very sick, and some of those require hospitalization. Some require ventilators.

Who will be infected?

Early research showed antibodies from people’s blood reacted to the virus in a percentage of cases (which doesn’t mean they won’t get it, but it might). About 1/3 of those over 60, and 6-9 percent of young people. None under 1 year old. There’s speculation variations of the Spanish Flu strain continued circulating until 1957, when a new strain took over. So those born before then have a higher chance of being protected.

Question:

I was told those with certain risk factors were at risk from dying from this flu, yet I saw stories about apparently extremely healthy, young people dying, and I wanted to find out why. There had to more to it - and there was. But I’ll save that for later on this page.

What’s different with this flu?

With seasonal influenza, the very young and the very old are more at risk of dying than anyone else because they have weak immune systems. This is what you’ve been told. But you’ve also been told this flu is different. Yes, it is.

With normal seasonal flu, people normally die of complications. These complications often start after people think they’re starting to get well, and then boom, you get sick again. It’s often pneumonia. But it’s often a bacterial infection on the tails of a flu or other illness. Normal seasonal flu doesn’t normally replicate in the lung tissue. This one does, so the pneumonia can be due to the flu itself, not necessarily a bacterial infection that comes later. That it replicates in the lungs worry doctors.

With this flu, you’ve got the usual features of a flu, and a few extra, in other words.

Risk factors for this flu:

• The risk factors are any illness that compromises your lungs and your breathing, as well as cardiovascular problems.
• Pregnant women, especially in third trimester, because of weakened immune systems and diminished breathing capability.
• Diabetes - both types.
• Possibly the obese - but statistics don’t single them out - it’s more that they tend to have other health issues because of the obesity and less room to breathe, plus more inflammation generally present in the body.
• The very young and very old, because of weakened immune systems.
• Supressed immune systems

What the risk factors won’t tell you, is that a very few extremely young, healthy individuals also die from this flu. I’ll have to take a long way to explain this:

Another way of killing:

The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed off maybe as much as a third of the world (yet my mom’s uncles and aunts all survived, even though they were the right age to die from it, go figure).

Scientists found frozen remains that contained the virus, unfroze them and managed to infect mice and macaques with the virus. These animals died very quickly and violently, and provided them with the explanation for how the Spanish Flu could kill people within 24-48 hours of falling sick. The animals experienced something called a cytokine storm. That’s when cytokines (part of the immune system) travels to the site of infection. Yet there are too many of them, and they’re the ones killing the host, rather than successfully fighting the infection. The infection is (usually) in the lungs, and the cytokines make the tissue hard and filled with fluid, so animals (and humans) die from lack of oxygen.

During the Spanish Flu, nurses triaged people by looking at their feet. Those with black feet were carted off to die, because they were too far gone. Lack of oxygen. The Bird Flu (which hasn’t really spread in human populations) kills by cytokine storm. It also happens with other illnesses, including during a drug trial.

During the macaque experiment, they infected these animals through several means, and the disease progressed extremely rapidly. I’ve seen speculation that the amount of infection (how much of the virus you get from someone else before it starts multiplying inside you) has something to do with whether or not you are at risk for a cytokine storm. I’m speculating, and so are the scientists. I’ve also seen talk about this happening if the immune system is weakened or turned off, then the host is full of infection, and if it then starts rallying, it could experience this cytokine storm. There’s speculation online that extremely healthy young adults could be more at risk for a cytokine storm. But some of the things said in those discussions would possibly put people more at risk. Cytokine storms are known in other areas of medicine, and there are many proposed ways of treating it. Few of those treatments are through the testing stages. There’s also some speculation about Benadryl and other common medications.

Conspiracy theorists are also talking about the three part vaccine as an intentional way of killing people - first shot turns off the immune system. Second shot introduces the virus. Third shot turns on the immune system. A strategy like that would realistically cause a fatal cytokine storm.

Which leads me to another speculation: The Swine Flu is not as virulent as the Spanish Flu. It doesn’t multiply as fast, which means only a very few experience a fatal cytokine storm. Most of the people who died of Swine Flu seem to have had risk factors of various sorts.

Doctors disagree if cytokine storm is a feature of Swine Flu at all. My speculation is that we’ve got both the replication in the lungs, AND cytokines - bot usually not a fatal storm, that makes people really sick.

What to do if you get sick:

Knee jerk reaction from doctors is to take pain killers to knock down the fever and relieve pain. Don’t. Viruses can’t multiply in your body if you have a 101-102 degree fever. It’s a way the body fights infection. And since there (according to my speculation) is a factor here about degree of infection, it’s best to not let it multiply. So lay off the paracet etc, unless the fever shoots up to dangerous levels (101-102 is not dangerous, as far as I know?). If the virus is hindered from multiplying, you won’t get as sick (lungs etc), though you’ll feel really bad!

Isolation. You’ll need to be isolated for at least 7 days, even if you feel fine after 3. You’re still contageous. Children can be contageous up to 10 days. Maybe a grownup who gets really sick is contageous for long too? I don’t know.

Tamiflu etc. Read the link about fever just above. Personally, I’m not sure about this one.

Monitor your symptoms.

• If you spit up blood, or colored sputum (means spit, I think), this indicate bleeding in the lungs - combined with difficulty breathing, so fight to see a doctor. The stuff you usually get when you’ve got a cold is yellow, or sometimes greenish (might sometimes indicate a bacterial infection, but not always), but if it turns orange or darker towards red, I’m speculating that means there’s blood somewhere? Nasal mucosa can bleed if you use too much nasal spray, so obviously, not all colored sputum indicates lung problems.
• High fever lasting more than three days
• Altered mental state
• Turning blue
• Low blood pressure

Read the link for more on children

Vaccine:
The vaccines they’re proposing to use have so far not been tested. There’s testing underway now or soon. Some conspiracy theorists speculate that the vaccine is the real killer. Even if it’s not, there are risk factors. In 1976 one person died from a new flu strain. A mass vaccination got underway quickly in the US. No more people died of the flu, which simply didn’t spread. But many died from the vaccine, and many got sick. Some got Guillain-Barré syndrome. It’s a risk with many vaccinations, including the ones they’re pushing now.

Even if you think you got infected, try and avoid getting more infection. There MIGHT be a theoretical difference between one virus and thousands invading your person at the same time..

Grab a Kassett DVD-box from Ikea.

Get a non-slip dash mat and lay it on top of the lid. Those mats are meant to be put on the dash of your car so cell phones and other items don’t slide around. It’s possible an old fashioned mouse pad will do, or something made of neoprene. But the dash mat is fantastic, so if they have that locally (try a store that has car stuff), use that. You could possibly skip the mat, but be aware the gadgets could slide off.

Inside the box you could place two Glis boxes (Ikea), plus two smaller plastic baskets. There should be plenty of room for chargers in there. And that’s why I chose the DVD-box over the CD-box - I wanted compartmented storage, and the CD-boxes can’t fit more than one Glis box inside.

If you place a power strip next to the box (I don’t recommend putting it inside the box because the chargers tend to produce a fair amount of heat, and it could theoretically burst into flames), you could use adjustable velcro straps to tame the power cables. Take out the chargers you need at the moment, with the gadgets still on top of the box while charging.

I have my box at the back of my desk, but it could also be placed on top of a shelf or cupboard. The power strip is hidden behind my LCD screen. You could also fasten it under the desk or in other fancy ways. You’d use velcro with two hard sides, and cable ties. That’s how we fasten routers, so it works!

I made a Norwegian version as well

Ta en Kassett DVD-boks fra Ikea.

Legg en anti-glimatte oppå. De pleide å ha denne på Clas-Ohlson, men jeg finner den ikke nå. Se på Europris. De har to litt mindre i bilutstyr-avdelingen. Disse er gummi-matter med et gjennombrutt mønster som er ment å legge på dasjbordet til bilen, sånn at du kan legge en mobil oppå uten at den sklir av. Jeg foretrekker en sånn oppå for at mobilen skal ligge litt stødigere. En gammeldags musematte kan kanskje gjøre samme nytte? Men du kan selvfølgelig hoppe over den - bare vær obs på dingsene kan skli av.

Inni boksen kan du for eksempel legge to Glis bokser (Ikea) for ekstra utstyr, og kanskje enda to mindre plastkurver (minste grå typen de har på Europris) oppå der igjen. Det er da god plass til flere ladere.

Om du legger et grenuttak i nærheten (anbefaler ikke å legge den inni boksen pga varmeutvikling på laderne), så kan du bruke f.eks. kabelbånd på laderne for å forhindre kabelsalat, og ta ut de(n) du trenger av boksen for øyeblikket, med mobilen fortsatt oppå boksen.

Jeg har min boks helt øverst på skrivebordet, men den kan også passe oppå en hylle i passelig høyde. Grenuttaket ligger bak LCD-skjermen. Du kan også feste det opp ned under skrivebordet eller på andre fantasifulle måter. Da bruker du borrelås med to harde sider, pluss buntebånd. Det er sånn vi setter fast routere, så det funker!

I’ve made an English language version of this post as well

http://www.annelisabeth.com/div/organizing8.htm

Det har forresten vært salg på Ikea en uke nå, og de har satt ned prisen på Kassett produkter. Det har vært en god tid å få med seg disse, siden prisen på dem har vært så god at de har vært billigere enn Samla plastbokser. Men om det fremdeles er salg til uka, ta en kikk på lagerbeholdningen på ditt varehus om morgenen før du drar. Det kan også tenkes å være forskjell på hvilke farger som er på tilbud. På Furuset har det stort sett vært rødt og svart på tilbud.

Om du vil legge igjen kommentarer på siden, gjør det her.

Problem is, the widgets don’t produce code that can be seen by spiders in your page source, unless those spiders are a bit more intelligent than I thought. Which also means the spiders won’t see the page as updated.

I wanted ONE page on a blog to have the feed from Friendfeed, I didn’t want it in my sidebar.

The only thing I’ve seen that works, easily, is Lifeline.

AND, it adds the welcome feature of stripping out Nofollow from the links you’ve added to your feed!

It’s not as pretty as the widget - no Youtube thumbnails, for instance, and the caption you add to the links aren’t included. So I think it’s a good idea to add a smaller widget below (without the feed) in addition to the spider fodder.

I found that Google sometimes doesn’t return text search results beyond the first few words on the page. Here’s my method and results:

I’m currently testing for the (removed) domain.

It’s a new domain registered in the beginning of October.

The first few days it was in the top of the Google results for the two keywords in the domain - found by freshbot following a link.

Then it disappeared. The only way to even get it to come up was to search for the entire domain.

After I put the actual design in place with some more pages (including pages with basically nothing on them), Google indexed most of the pages. The only page to have a cache was the index page, but all pages had a blurb.

Now I started to do text searches for phrases on the pages. Nothing came up.

I started doing the same thing, only with site:nameofsite.com in the search. And I found something curious. If I searched for phrases near the top of the page, I couldn’t get very far before it returned no results. The title of the page is 47 characters, and then there are the keywords. The Meta description was shown, and I could search phrases as long as the last word wasn’t further into the page than character 43 of the Meta description.

But I could search for single words further down the page, or even several words - it returned results easily.

But if I use those exact same search words without specifying site:nameofsite.com, the page is not in the results.

However, a blog I’ve had for a few years got a different treatment. I wrote a blog post yesterday, and it’s not only in Google today, I can search for phrases at the bottom of the post, and it comes up, no problem.

Update: Guess what, THIS post got indexed by Google within an hour of me writing it, and I can search for phrases far down the page, no problem. However, both the blog index and the blog post are returned by Google without a cache.

Update November 4:

I still sometimes see the old content in Google’s index, meaning there are datacenters that still have the old index. But even so, it appears the additional pages on the site are dropped from the index. On other other hand, I can now find the site by searching for the domain name, without specifying site: first. And if I search for site:www.domain.com and phrases, I can find them even far down the page, while site:domain.com still has the same behavior. I still don’t get any results from the site, though, even if I search for namerofsite. It’s pretty normal to get the domains first in the results if you search like that.

Update November 7:

The site is now searchable and ranking well in Google!

But I know from experience that non-techies tend to be completely unrealistic when harddrives fail, so I’ll describe what happened, so maybe others will be able to save their data before it’s too late.

This was a laptop. An old one, with an old harddrive.

The first thing that happened was that I was a bit less careful when moving the laptop than I usually am. I thought, hmm, that might not have been smart. In general, you should not shock a harddrive. An average harddrive will survive some shocks just fine, while another - much less severe - will kill it. It depends on the angle of impact, what direction it’s moving, whether or not it’s on, whether or not it’s accessing or writing data as you move it. The worst time to drop a harddrive, is when it’s writing to disk.

And keep in mind that laptops are moved about a LOT more than desktop computers. The more you schlep your laptop around, the shorter lifespan your harddrive will have. Expect to replace your laptop harddrive at least once in the life of the computer. And make sure all your data is backed up. As the harddrive nears the end of it’s life, some data may become inaccessible, but you may not realize. So checking the data is something that was done a lot in the past.

Get into the habit of listening to the harddrive, as it boots up and as you work on the computer. If it starts sounding different, it could be going bad, and you’ll need to do backup IMMEDIATELY.

What happened with this one, was that I was watching video on it, with the video file on the harddrive. And it would stop playing now and then. If I waited, it would start playing again, but I had to rewind a bit to get what I’d missed in the meantime. I didn’t know why in the beginning, this was a Linux machine, so I wondered if it was OS related, or if it was going warm. But then I noticed that the harddrive light (the light that shows you’re accessing the harddrive) was staying solidly lit while the video was stopped.

That’s when I knew the harddrive might fail.

The second day, again watching a video, after having jiggled the harddrive connection (in case it was caused by a loose connection), it happened again, and this time the video didn’t come on. I moved the mouse, and suddenly I’m met by a black screen with white error messages. I was in the middle of a video, and hoped I could get it to work again, so I tried to reboot, but got the message there was no boot disk.

Harddrive history.

Don’t feel bad for me, I had nothing on that machine I didn’t have a copy of, as far as I can remember.

I just wanted to share how that happened, and to be careful if it happens to you.

I’ve used Artisteer, a program for making Wordpress templates. The only item I prepared myself was the image of myself. I tried to cut out all the background and make it invisible. Not easy to do when you’ve got hair as fluffy as I do, and the background is White! I saved it as PNG, which preserves the invisible background, and then imported it into Artisteer as a photo that was floating on the header background. That way any embellishments on the header won’t be over the photo of me.

The rest is done in the program. All the color choices were made one by one - there’s no way to set a custom color palette. I would have liked that, because it’s a chore to change all those colors to my palette. But apart from that it’s really easy to do, if you choose a pre-existing palette, and don’t fiddle as much with the photo as I did - there are built in photos of generic people in the program, along with landscapes and cityscapes for the header background - it could take you ten minutes flat to build a template.

When I was done with the Wordpress template, I made a few structural changes, and saved the same project as HTML. I did a nondestructive edit, and copied the project file to a different name, just in case I wanted changes to the blog template without affecting the HTML version.

The HTML output needs a lot of work once you’re done with it. You need to change the menu choices - in HTML, and you should change headers here and there and content. But once you’re done with all that, you’ve got a file you can use as a template for other pages on your website. Just remember that if your site has a folder structure, you should use absolute links in the menu, or the links could easily break deep down in your site.

I also opted to move the css and js files to a subdirectory, as well as change the name of the folder of the images to layoutimages, to avoid any conflict with existing files in my site.

The really painful job is of course the cleanup of all the outdated stuff my website has accumulated in the course of the 10 years it’s been online (total, including before I bought the domain name), and also convert all the pages to the new design. I fully expect to make several versions of the design and do some fancy copy and paste of code to make it all work. That’s the beauty of it, you could have two columns on some pages, and three on others - the overall design would still be the same.

I’ve never used sub items to menu links before, and especially liked that. I had a lightbulb moment when I wondered what to put under the CONTACT menu item that was created automatically. Should I keep it? I realized I could put Facebook, Myspace and Flickr links in the sub items, and just point the main item to the front page. Brilliant.

I’ve got loads of broken links now because of the switch. I really don’t care…

I think I’ll look through the old stuff and delete some and maybe clean up some of the Norwegian posts. This blog has now been migrated at least twice since the initial install, so there are some problems with the Norwegian characters.

I’m also going to switch templates. The basic one is hideous. Not that I’m disturbed by that, but I need the practice. Not for installing another template, but for hopefully doing one myself, or at least modifying a prebuilt one.