High Blood Pressure

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 20th, 2009 | 0 Comments

For a few years I have always had some very bad headaches. Usually when someone gets a headache, they might let it pass by itself or take some medicine to relieve the pain. However when I used to have really bad headaches I would take some medicine and it would work at times and other times it would have no effect.

The pain in my head I used to get was really bad, the headaches would last for a few hours, sometimes 2 or 3 hours or sometimes more!,  sometimes I would simply go to my room, shut the curtains and turn the light off so that I would have complete darkness and would have less strain on my eyes. I always thought that these headaches might be some kind of migraine.

I had these kinds of headaches for a few years, and I was just too lazy to go to the doctor to see what might be causing it or how I could prevent them. Well about a month ago now I finally had enough of the head-aches and decided I would do something about them.

I went and visited my doctor and he was a bit confused on what I might have. He said it could possibly be a migraine but there are not enough symptoms to be a migraine. He then decided to have a quick look at my blood pressure, not expecting to see anything wrong, and he turned out to be really surprised.

It turns out I have really high blood pressure and that was what might have caused my head-aches. He then went on to prescribe me medicine to try and lower my high blood pressure. Also he referred me to a cardiologist so that I could have further tests carried out.

I got my appointment dates and I had to get a blood pressure monitor put on me for 24 hours, which I am currently wearing as I write this post. And then tomorrow I will be going to get an echo scan and to see the results of wearing my blood pressure monitor.

The idea of these tests are to find out the cause of the high blood pressure and then find a way to bring it down to a normal level. The medicine I am currently on will most likely be either increased in dosage or be replaced. But usually with high blood pressure, once you are on the medicine, you are on it for life.

The doctor was surprised to find that I had high blood pressure because it is apparently rare enough for my age, 19! So I am looking forward to finally finding out what is causing the high blood pressure. I am in no way worried about it, it is easy to deal with, a tablet or 2 a day and you are sorted :D .

One thing I have noticed so far is that since I was given medicine my really bad head-aches have gone! It's great, no more pain :D . Anyway as soon as I find out my results, I will make another post about it.

Eircom Hacked?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 19th, 2009 | 5 Comments

My internet service provider (ISP) is Eircom. I always notice that my c0nnection is really slow, and apparently that is to be expected with Eircom.

However last Monday my broadband was actually cutting out now and again and was becoming slow at loading pages every so often. I thought nothing of it, I just put it down to the fact that Eircom's broadband was always that slow.

Then on Wednesday of this week I was reading the newspaper (The Argus) and found an article saying that Eircom had been in fact hacked on the Monday night that I had experienced the really slow page load speed!

Apparently a lot of unwanted traffic was directed to the Eircom servers, which caused a strain on the servers and by chain reaction caused a lot of users to experience either really slow speeds or to lose their internet connection completely.

I then went over to Eircom's tech support page and saw a customer notice explaining the problem that occurred, the article below is the notice they published to their site which was put up the day after the problem was fixed.

I was also reading an article about how Eircom are fully aware that there network is slow at times, and apparently they say they have no intention in the near future of upgrading their networks. You would think that since they are one of the most popular Internet Service Provider's in Ireland that they would want to have the best service available.

We currently subscribe to a package for our landline and our broadband to be in one bundle. When you sign up to Eircom you must take out a one year contract with them, it is a clause they have built in to keep their customers.

However our one year contract is up and we have begun to look at other providers to see what they have to offer. Recently Vodafone have started to offer a bundle for your landline and broadband and are giving it at a much better price.

My current broadband speed it 3mb however I could change to Vodafone and upgrade my broadband to 7.6mb and still save money!

The only thing stopping me at the moment from changing is that I have to find out more about their broadband.

First I want to see if it is actually good and second is they say they have a 30gb download limit, I want to know if they actually enforce this limit or do they let you away with going over it because I know with Eircom they have the same limit however they do not enforce any penalties if you go over it.

It Never Worked Before!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 15th, 2009 | 0 Comments

When writing blog posts I usually like to include at least one picture. It breaks up all the text, because I always find that when reading long pages of text I would usually give up half way just because it looks like too much too read.

But whenever I see a long page of text with images I seem to always pay attention a bit more, and also it is easier on the eyes :D . So a feature on wordpress is to allow you to simply click a button and choose to add a photo to a post while you are writing it.

Unfortunately up until I upgraded to wordpress version 2.8 it would never work for me for some reason, I have no idea why. I used to have to add my photos to my site using an ftp client and then link to the using the URL of the image, but it is just great to be able to add pictures with ease now.

Other people that used wordpress must have had this same problem. Anyway I just thought I would say how I got it working again, so if anyone has had that problem or still has that problem just upgrade to the latest version of wordpress and that should fix the problem :) .